Diary of a bewildered baby boomer

It will take more than cash to pay us back

HELP! Geoff is calling for a full and frank disclosure of all my expenditure over the past four years. I can’t think what has put this in his mind. He only ever usually shows concern when he catches me smuggling in another pile of books after one of my charity shop swoops. Now, though, he is keen to know what I’ve spent on standard household items.

“Can you define ‘standard household items’?” I ask, playing for time. I hope I don’t have to come clean about the £6.85 I’ve just spent on a hard-to-justify but very desirable nail file made of glass that my sister told me would change my nails, if not my life, for the better.

She may be right, but it would still be difficult to explain away in these days when receipts can tell such big stories about us and the lives we lead.

I keep my fingers crossed – so much easier to do now that my nails are filed – and fortunately Geoff’s reply shows me he is not interested in reckless purchases like a glass nail file but in the more prosaic, day-to-day bills that I’ve paid.

“Oh, you know, things like having the moat cleared and the telly changed for one of those new-fangled ones,” he says.

Ah yes, I know what he means. The things without which we couldn’t do our jobs properly – or maybe even breathe, if we’re to believe some of what we’ve heard and read in recent days.

Antique rugs, mock Tudor beams, massage chairs, trouser presses – honestly, I assure Geoff, I know you may find this hard to believe but we’ve managed to run this household without needing to buy any of those things.

And by cutting back and not being too ambitious, we’ve even be able to change our own light bulbs and travel short distances without needing to hire a chauffeur-driven car, I tell him with a winning smile. I can see he’s impressed.

I think I’m off the hook. However, what I’m left with now is the nagging worry that our exchange has been captured on a CCTV camera that’s possibly scanning Hill Towers this very minute.

That would be one of the cameras whose installation the government has encouraged, the better to keep an eye on our lives. Yes, I know they have their uses and I am not saying we shouldn’t have them (I do mean the cameras, certainly not the government), but guess who goes all shy and defensive, lashing out with venomous words, when we, the innocent populace, seek to turn the eye on them and shine a probing light on to their dark deeds?

So much has been written and said about this subject that it hardly needs me to weigh in with my two-penn’orth, but I’m afraid I find it hard to resist. The cheek of it all! How dare these MPs – and sadly for the saints among them, I am afraid they are all now pretty much tarred with the same brush – treat us with such contempt? They cheerfully look down their noses at banana republics and oddball countries where the economy is seemingly based on tax dodges and backhanders, yet they milk what they can from us and turn what we had once proudly thought was a democracy into a worldwide laughing stock.

If voting in a General Election is the only way we can truly demonstrate our disgust for such deceitful, duplicitous behaviour, then bring it on. But parliament needs more than that. It needs to be comprehensively flushed out, the drains rodded and drenched with bleach and then, only then, might we have something approaching the squeaky clean representation that we deserve. And that we are now most definitely owed.